glamorous and exotic had permeated popular culture. In the 1937 version of the film A Star is Born, the young girl being groomed for stardom, played by Janet Gaynor is repeatedly asked by an employee of the studio publicity department if she has any Russian ancestry in the hope of creating a more exciting image for her.
Diaghilev’s designers, notably Leon Bakst, played a vital role in developing the Art Deco style with which de Lempicka became associated. In particular Bakst’s designs for the 1910 production of Sheherazade had an extraordinary impact on fashion and interior design. For the next generation, fashionable Parisian hostesses dressed themselves and decorated their salons as though for an oriental orgy. Even in the late 1920s, photographs of Tamara de Lempicka’s bedrooms show decors which, though much pared down from the lushness of Bakst’s designs, make them look as if Nijinsky’s sex slave would not be out of place as an overnight guest.
Paris in the inter-war period was teeming with Russian refugees. It was jokingly said that every second taxi driver in Paris was either a real or pretend Grand Duke. It was a situation that inspired the popular play Tovarich (turned into a Hollywood movie in 1937 starring Charles Boyer and Claudette Colbert) in which two former members of the Russian royal family are forced to earn a living as a butler and ladies’ maid in a wealthy Parisian household. A book on Parisian pleasures with charming Art Deco illustrations, entitled Paris leste commented on Russians partying in Paris, “you could think that there was a pre-war Russian party – that is to say a party where the Russians have money and a post-war Russian party, which is a party where the Russians don’t have money anymore. It’s the same thing! You find the same princes, the same imperial officers and officials in the same clubs. They’re doing the same thing. The only difference is that they used to be the clients and paid, whereas now they are employed by the house.” Tamara herself later claimed to be employing a couple of Russian aristocrats in disguise when she went to live in Hollywood.
Woman with Dove, 1931. Oil on panel, 37 × 28 cm, Private Collection.
Women Bathing, 1929. Oil on canvas, 89 × 99 cm, Private Collection.
Group of Four Nudes, c. 1925. Oil on canvas, 130 × 81 cm, Private Collection.
Apart from all the dancers, musicians and artists associated with Diaghilev already mentioned, there were numerous creative Russians intermittently or permanently resident in Paris. They included the conductor Sergei Koussevitsky, the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, the singers Nina Koshetz, Oda Slobodskaya, Natalie Wetchor and the entire Kedroff family, all of whom played an important role in the musical life of Paris and the artists Marc Chagall, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Natalia Goncharova, Nadia Khodossivitch-Leger, Jacques Lipchitz, Serge Poliakoff, Chaim Soutine, Ossip Zadkine, Romain de Tirtoff (known, as Erté), Chana Orloff, Antoine Pevsner and, after 1933, Naum Gabo and Vassili Kandinsky.
De Lempicka’s early years in Paris were not happy. Though never reduced to the penury of so many of her refugee compatriots, she was nevertheless dependent upon the largesse of her wealthier relations. Despite the birth of her daughter Kizette, Tamara’s love match with Tadeusz was turning sour as a result of her own infidelities and his frustrations. He refused as demeaning the offer of a job in her uncle’s bank. According to her own account it was out of this grim situation and a desire for financial and personal independence that de Lempicka’s artistic vocation was born. Tamara confessed her plight to her younger sister Adrienne, resulting in the following conversation between the sisters; – “Tamara, why don’t you do something – something of your own? Listen to me, Tamara. I am studying architecture. In two years I’ll be an architect, and I’ll be able to make my own living and even help out Mama. If I can do this, you can do something too” “What? What? What?” “I don’t know, painting perhaps. You can be an artist. You always loved to paint. You have talent. That portrait you did of me when we were children…” The rest, as they say, is history. Tamara bought the brushes and paints, enrolled in an art school, sold her first pictures within months and made her first million (francs) by the time she was twenty-eight.
Once again, de Lempicka’s life, according to her own version, begins to sound like a bad movie script and it’s impossible to believe it can all have been that simple. A woman who continued to practice her art so doggedly long after it passed out of fashion and there was nothing practical to be gained from it, cannot have taken up her vocation in such a casual way and on such purely mercenary grounds. Nevertheless Tamara took herself for tuition to two distinguished painters in succession; Maurice Denis (1870–1943) and André Lhote (1885–1962).
The Sleeping Girl, 1923. Oil on canvas, 89 × 146 cm, Private Collection.
Seated Nude, c. 1923. Oil on canvas, 94 × 56 cm, Private Collection.
Nude, Blue Background, 1923. Oil on canvas, 70 × 58.5 cm, Private Collection.
De Lempicka later claimed that she did not gain much from Denis. It is indeed difficult to imagine that the intensely Catholic Denis would have been much in sympathy with the worldly, modish and erotic tendencies that soon began to display themselves in Tamara’s work. Nevertheless Denis was an intelligent initial choice as a teacher for the aspiring artist. For a brief period in the early 1890s Denis had been at the cutting edge of early modernism as a leading member of the Nabis group that included Vuillard, Bonnard, Sérusier, Ranson and Vallotton. Inspired by the synthetism of Gauguin’s Breton paintings, Denis and his friends broke with the naturalism of Salon painting and the very different naturalism of the impressionists who were tied to sensory perception and painted small pictures in flat patches of bright, exaggerated colours. In 1890 when he was only 20, Denis published his Definition of Neo-traditionism chiefly remembered today for its resounding opening statement, “It is well to remember that picture, before being a battle horse, a nude woman or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.” It is a statement that could be used to justify the formalism of modern art and even (something that Denis himself would never have accepted) the abandonment of the figurative in art altogether. After a visit to Rome in 1898 in the company of André Gide, Denis turned his back on modernism and was increasingly identified with classicism and with the reactionary Catholicism that was to have such a baleful influence on French cultural and political life in the twentieth century. It was perhaps his reputation for being associated with everything most retrogressive in French art that led de Lempicka to downplay Denis’ importance in her development. However the firm linearity and smooth modelling of the forms in Denis’ later works as well as his attempts to marry modernity with the classical tradition can hardly have failed to influence the young de Lempicka. The aesthetic expressed by Denis in his 1909 publication From Gauguin and Van Gogh to Classicism was surely one with which she would have agreed. “For us painters, our progress towards classicism was based on our good judgement in addressing art’s central problems, both aesthetic and psychological… we demonstrated that any emotion or state of mind aroused by a particular sight gave rise in the artist’s imagination to symbols or concrete equivalents which were able to excite identical emotions, of states of mind, without the need to create a copy of the original sight, and that for each nuance of our emotional make-up there was a corresponding object in tune with it and able to represent it fully. Art is not simply a visual sensation that we receive, – a photograph however sophisticated of nature. No, it is a creation of the mind, for which nature is merely the springboard.” This is surely true of de Lempicka’s strangely cerebral and abstracted portraits of the 1920s.
De Lempicka was far more ready to acknowledge the influence of her second teacher André Lhote. Whilst Denis must have seemed like a relic of the nineteenth century, Lhote born in 1885, was not much more than a decade older than
